Raj Patel grew up in north-west London where his family ran a corner shop. Patel received a B.A in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, and a Masters Degree from the London School of Economics, and gained his PhD in Development Sociology from Cornell University in 2002. He has been a visiting scholar at Yale and the University of California, Berkeley. As part of his academic training, Patel worked at the World Bank, World Trade Organization and the United Nations. He has since become an outspoken public critic of all of these organizations and it seems that people either love him or hate him – he has been named as “the antichrist’ by some whilst a New Age group is claiming him as the next Christ! Whether your love him or hate him – his message seems to be completely aligned with the spirit of BNI – namely that sharing and taking an interest in others is the way forwards for business and the way forwards for humanity.  Here is a short video of Raj Patel talking about his new book:

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Understanding your company’s values and being true to them provides stability for your organisation and a basis for staff to feel a sense of connectedness with the organisation, which helps with staff attraction and retention.

So says Ruth Donde, regional manager, New Zealand, of Results Coaching Systems.

“Values and culture are linked. If the culture of your organisation is hierarchical – that is fine – but you need to attract people who thrive in that sort of environment and believe in status and titles – people who fit in with the company’s values.”

She says it doesn’t help to say your values are one thing when in practise they’re another – such as a hierarchical organisation saying that everyone counts in the same way.

She says you need to go through a process in realising your company values – not just put a group of words together and stick them on a wall.

“Understand what’s important to your organisation, what’s going on in it, and what do you want it to be like. This doesn’t take a couple of meetings – it can take months and involves deep discussions and plenty of honesty.
“It’s good to involve the whole company and not just have a top-down approach. In the end the key for buy-in is embedding those values.

“For example, if teamwork is a key value, don’t give out individual rewards. It doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to encourage teamwork to give a bottle of wine to the top achiever – reward the whole team that does the best. Also, make collaboration a part of your KPIs.”

Jasbindar Singh, coaching psychologist and executive coach of SQ Executive Management Consultancy, agrees.

She says: “Values are fundamental to the purpose and strategy of your company. You need to ask: Who are we? What are we trying to achieve and how do we best get there.

“Typically the senior leadership may do some work on what values they deem important for their business but invariably this needs to be rolled out and tested with the staff at all levels.

“They need to have some input into the kinds of attitude and behaviour the chosen values translate to.”

Singh says being clear on values is very important.

“For example two different companies may have innovation as a core value. For one the translated behaviour may be around taking risk while for another the focus maybe more about looking out for a different ways of doing things.”

Understanding your company’s values and being true to them provides stability for your organisation and a basis for staff to feel a sense of connectedness with the organisation, which helps with staff attraction and retention.

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9am – 11am on Monday 29th March at Sports House, Harbour Sport, Stadium Drive, Albany, 2nd right Nth Harbour Stadium

(Book on line on the BNI New Zealand website).

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We have just finished totally the amounts raised by the chapters during the year – and when this is added to the total raised from the BNI golf day, the BNI Hospice Education scholarships, and the personal donation from BNI Support – the total figure raised comes to $100,126.

This is a very positive step forwards in terms of our ongoing partnership with Hospice New Zealand

Thanks to everyone who has helped to made this possible!

Graham

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Kia Ora Graham,
 
We are fast approaching Z-Day and the Venus Project International Tour visit.  Now is the time to be getting together with members in your region to start planning events.
 
Z-Day: So far Auckland are looking at running a major event the venue is yet to be confirmed the date is March 13th 2010 please keep an eye out on the forum for updates as well as visiting the global Z-day website http://www.zday2010.org/index.php?option=com_events&view=events&layout=map&Itemid=69
 
The Venus Project World Tour In NZ April 2010: This event will see The Venus Project’s Jacque Fresco & Roxanne Meadows lecturing presentations throughout New Zealand. Venues are yet to be confirmed the regions hosting lectures at this stage are Auckland & Hamilton. If you would like priority access to tickets for Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows when they visit New Zealand in April please visit http://www.thevenusprojectnz.org/
 
We are looking to be particularly well organised for both these events. If you have any skills in the fields of marketing, event management, press releases and public relations then please post on forums here http://www.tzmnz.com/apps/forums/topics/show/1936933-z-day-2010-nz-work-in-progress?page=last

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Recently I spoke with Corinne Cort,  who served as the director of global learning for a leading-edge telecommunications company. She shared with me the following social learning example.

The wireless manufacturer was growing rapidly. As a result, they were hiring software and hardware engineers at an incredible pace. The organization’s formal learning programs could hardly keep up with the rapid development of technology. New engineers typically had two questions:

• Who within the organization was the expert on topic X or Y?
• What information do these experts know which might answer my question?

In the old days, these questions would be answered by a formal Knowledge Management system and application. This top-down approach was tried in the 1990s, but it often failed spectacularly because few people invested the time necessary to actually create resource information. In many cases the Knowledge Management system sat empty because people saw it as a detriment to getting “actual work” done. There was an organizational misalignment between the goals of the organization and the goals of the individual.

Now, let’s return to the example of the telecommunications company. Engineers, working in different parts of the company, recognized learning gaps within the organization. They didn’t look for an executive champion to launch a Knowledge Management system. Instead, these engineers went open-source and created wikis around the knowledge gaps.

Wiki pages are simple to set-up and create content (as evidenced by wikipedia). Soon, wiki pages were appearing in various departments throughout the entire organization. These wiki pages represented a bottom-up social learning solution designed by engineers for their peers.

However, these wiki pages also presented a number of challenges:

• Dispersed: There was no central repository for these wiki pages. They were hosted in different areas, so you had to know about them to find them.
• Standards and Structure: varied from department to department.
• Alignment: There may be gaps between the wiki’s content and the organization’s goals.
• Validation: The content on the wiki page may not have been vetted by organization’s top subject-matter expert in the area.

When Corinne learned about these projects, she encouraged them to come within a common platform and framework. The wiki solution needed to be able to scale to a much larger scale. As a result, people needed to take responsibility for making key decisions about the wiki’s organizations and structure. The bottom-up process evolved into a managed process that still retained many of its peer-to-peer characteristics. However, rules-making and process also slows down the development of social learning content.

Based on her experience, Corrine shares the following wisdom: “Social learning is unavoidable and enables agile knowledge transfer within organizations. But to be most effective, all levels of management must promote, enable and sustain the social learning systems.”

Sometimes an organization needs a top-down social learning solution; however, grassroots social learning solutions will naturally fill gaps when authorized solutions cannot  be (or have not been) developed. A savvy social learning strategy allows for four different models:

• Rollout of authorized top-down solutions (mentor programs, centralized social learning tools)
• Creation of grassroots social learning solutions (vibrant ecosystem)
• Roadmap to transition grassroots social learning solutions into managed processes with structure and accountability
• Roadmap to transition top-down social learning solutions into community-managed projects with distributed structure and accountability

No single solution will match every organizational need. Therefore, learning managers must manage all four social learning processes.

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“Ranting has done more to change the world than chanting ever has.” – Douglas Castle

I would ask that each of us become an activist for the right reasons and for the right causes. There is much that is wrong in this world, emotionally as well as economically. Misplaced trust and disillusionment must not be permitted to allow us to accept an ever-declining standard, to embrace mediocrity, to be less than the greatness of our potential…our birthright.

I have heard it said that “all that is needed for evil to triumph is for good persons to stand idly by and do nothing.” But I also believe that a “critical mass” of good people, working together in cooperation, collaboration and harmony toward a great and noble goal can achieve anything. Let this year be the year that we celebrate our diversity with a spirit of unity, for those many things that unite us are far greater and far more important than those things which we have let divide us.

We cannot depend upon governments, giant corporate conglomerates and that miniscule and manipulative percentage of the population which controls the bulk of the world’s vast wealth to bring us peace and prosperity. We must look inside of ourselves, and toward each other. Working together, in the spirit of sharing of efforts and rewards can help us, as entrepreneurs, as Internationalists and as Human Beings, to become free from the misery that the erosion of productive and ethical initiatives has brought upon us.

We do not have to beg when we can build. Not one of us has to stand alone. We must take back the power to be great, and to truly be free. This freedom entails responsibility. And we can no longer abdicate our responsibility or depend upon an economic wave or a taxpayer-financed supernatural miracle to save us.

We must break the cycle of pettiness and knee-jerk reactions and start being thinkers and planners and doers. We have let our will to win atrophy. We have muscles which we have forgotten how to use. The awesome magic of our species is our ability to complement each other, to teach each other, to assist each other. As a community, as a Global Interworked Cooperative Business Community we have access to unlimited communications, resources and power.

We have been fools not to see it — we would be far greater fools not to use it. As a multitude, as a collective, we are far greater than the sum of our individual constituents. We have the synergy at our disposal.

Join my club. Become proactive instead of reactive. Let’s get to know each other. This is not about networking. This is not about connecting. This is about combining, sharing and prospering.

When I joined The National Networker Companies over a year ago, my dream, my hope was to utilize the framework that Adam Kovitz had created out of love and inspiration in order to build a colossus of an entity wherein each participant would contribute resources and efforts, and where all could share in ownership and profits from a diversified and ever-growing stream of revenue.

Join us. Show us who you are. Let us get to know you. Let us discover our areas of commonality and our areas of complementarity. Let us build peace and prosperity as if we were a sovereign nation in the limitless realm of cyberspace. And most of all, let’s make it personal as well as professional. To accomplish what needs to be done, we must re-discover the notion of caring about each other, and set aside the constant scrambling to steal from each other or to sell to each other.

Let’s stop the self-defeating frenzy and become committed allies. The National Networker Companies will become the world’s first GICBC. It costs nothing to say “yes” and join. In an entrepreneurial meritocracy, some of our numbers will leave, but many will stay.

I hope and pray that we will grow to be a force to change things for the better for every one of us…and for us to show each other, and the world, that we are capable of being a great civilization.

Join us at http://twitlik.com/IN

We owe it to ourselves and to one another to see just how far we can go – working together. We owe it to our children and to the future of Humankind.

Thank you, one and all. May the year 2010 begin not merely our own, home-launched economic and social recovery, but may it be a year of the re-kindling of civilization, with its peace, prosperity and greater security.

Douglas Castle Vice-Chairman and Director,

THE NATIONAL NETWORKER COMPANIES

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Good magazine - New Zealand’s only carbon-neutral sustainability lifestyle magazine – has created this comprehensive compilation of research from New Zealand’s leading sustainability and research companies. This presentation will give you a clearer perspective on what the growing ethical consumer market in New Zealand will be expecting from companies in 2010.

The presentation includes : Moxie/TNS LOHAS Research, Nielsen Media Consumers Who Care, NZBCSD Shape NZ Poll, Sustainable Advantage, Sustainability Priorities Monitor and Good’s readership results from The Research Agency.

“Good is delivering very wealthy influential eco consumers who are completely focused on sustainability and are prepared to pay for it. In 2010 our readers will be purchasing millions of dollars worth of ethical eco products and services. The business managers that subscribe and receive Good are in control of companies that represent more than 40% of the GDP. In 2010, 6,040 of our readers will be buying or building a new home, 4,900 will be changing electricity companies and 12,763 will consider changing banks. 94% of our readers are more likely to buy a product if it is eco friendly and 86% will buy that product even if its more expensive. Unfortunately I have had laryngitis for the past three weeks and was not able to present this research to you. So please download the presentation and if your company or client is focused on sustainability don’t forget about Good for your 2010 media plans as we are delivering a highly targeted eco consumer market”.

If you would like me to present this research to you or have any questions, please email me at gavin@good.net.nz

Download the presentation at  http://good.net.nz/assets/files/good-presentation-nov09.pdf

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As the BNI membership transitions from being predominantly ‘Baby Boomers’ to ‘Generation X’ over the next few years – we are looking to introduce changes here in NZ to ensure that we continue to meet the requirements and expectations of our clients (our members).  Accordingly we are currently investigating ‘on line’ training and mentoring, ‘on line application forms’, commissioning a high quality video to add to the website and introducing new member trainings etc. In terms of Social Networking – not only do we need to cater to the expectations of our ‘younger’ members – we also have a responsibility to help to coach our existing ‘baby boomer’ members to get up to speed with these changes – so that they don’t get left behind!  We intend to introduce a state of the art Ning platform for BNI in NZ and to look at ways of up-skilling our existing members as to how to be part of this change – we will literally be “Changing the Way the World Does Business!”

The ‘Aha Moment’ for me was the realisation that as the world goes forwards from here, that businesses that remain vested in the ‘old school’ style of hierarchical management are going to start to break down.  It is not so much that the Generation X’s and Y’s are going to be challenging them – their downfall is going to be that they will simply cease to be relevant.  Unless business provides this new generation with what they want – I believe that they are simply going to walk on by and will not bother to engage.  They will look – once – at what is on offer and if they don’t like what they see – it will simply be a case of –‘Whatever!’

The times they are a changing and the writing is on the wall.  As we move forwards businesses are either going to be seen as being ‘green and growing’ or ‘ripe and rotting!’   

Hierarchy is finally on the way out and I say “Not before Time!”

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